ChainifyDB: How to Blockchainify any Data Management System

TL;DR

ChainifyDB introduces a novel blockchain layer that can be integrated with existing heterogeneous data management systems, offering stronger guarantees, higher throughput, and flexible transaction processing without requiring deterministic execution or data tampering resistance from individual systems.

Contribution

It proposes the Whatever-LedgerConsensus model and ChainifyDB, enabling blockchainification of existing data systems with improved guarantees and performance.

Findings

Up to 6x higher throughput than Fabric

Supports heterogeneous transaction processing systems

Provides a robust recovery mechanism

Abstract

Today's permissioned blockchain systems come in a stand-alone fashion and require the users to integrate yet another full-fledged transaction processing system into their already complex data management landscape. This seems odd as blockchains and traditional DBMSs share large parts of their processing stack. Thus, rather than replacing the established data systems altogether, we advocate to simply 'chainify' them with a blockchain layer on top. Unfortunately, this task is far more challenging than it sounds: As we want to build upon heterogeneous transaction processing systems, which potentially behave differently, we cannot rely on every organization to execute every transaction deterministically in the same way. Further, as these systems are already filled with data and being used by top-level applications, we also cannot rely on every organization being resilient against tampering with its local data. Therefore, in this work, we will drop these assumptions and introduce a powerful processing model that avoids them in the first place: The so-called Whatever-LedgerConsensus (WLC) model allows us to create a highly flexible permissioned blockchain layer coined ChainifyDB that (a) is centered around bullet-proof database technology, (b) makes even stronger guarantees than existing permissioned systems, (c) provides a sophisticated recovery mechanism, (d) has an up to 6x higher throughput than the permissioned blockchain system Fabric, and (e) can easily be integrated into an existing heterogeneous database landscape.